Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Revit slow saving to SMB share

So you are using Revit, and notice that saving to a SMB share is horribly slow? Is the SMB share on a Domain Controller? When saving a file to the server do you notice 100% utilization of your server disk?

Well, it turns out that when saving a file, Revit uses a mode called "Write Through". What this means is that the "save" will not finish until the entire file has been written to disk. This bypasses any write cache that Windows might utilize. It's even worse if the share is on a Domain Controller since by default Domain Controllers will disable write caching on the disk.

So, this results in extremely slow writes.
The solution? Well, there isn't one really. You have to move the share off the domain controller. Then ensure the disk on the server you are saving to is fast enough to amount of data being written to it.

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